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New survey among financial professionals in Britain shows that more than half of those who have invested in cryptocurrencies, plan to buy more coins this year. Despite recent market volatility, only 8 percent of the interviewed intend to sell their cryptos. The majority of the investors expect crypto valuations to rise over the next 12 months.

There’s controversy in the crypto community after one of the founders of a prominent wallet service for storing and sending cryptocurrencies abruptly announced a rival venture.

Taylor Monahan, who start MyEtherWallet.com (MEW) with Kosala “Kvhnuke” Hemachandra in 2015, announced a new company and wallet service called MyCrypto.com on Thursday. MyCrypto.com is initially a forked version of MEW, but the company said it will launch an enhanced version of the website soon. Desktop and mobile apps are set to arrive “in the coming months.”

J.P. Morgan has called cryptocurrencies the “innovative maelstrom” around Blockchain and said they are “unlikely to disappear” in what appears to be an internal report from the company, published Feb. 8, 2018.

In an extract from what is allegedly the banking giant’s executive summary on cryptocurrency, the company appears bullish on crypto’s future.

“Cryptocurrencies are the face of the innovative maelstrom around the Blockchain technology that is bringing both massive price volatility and a constant trial-and-error of new product try-outs and failures,” the report states.

This past January the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) developers and community began implementing a new address format called ‘Cashaddr.’ The new protocol serialization makes BCH addresses distinct from other cryptocurrency formats in order to reduce user error, and the change also bolsters some future network functionalities as well. Over the past two weeks, many BCH supporting businesses and service providers have upgraded to the new format.

“The Casper aspect of Casper, where two conflicting blocks should not be able to be finalized, seems to actually happen running and the network agrees all along what the final chain is. So that part has been totally successful,” Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s co-founder, said in a research updаte during the developers meeting.

The Proof of Stake hybrid Casper is on testnet, and has been running for a few weeks, but not without problems. The nodes apparently keep reconnecting and randomly get a flood of connections, so devs have to perform round-about hacks to keep it going.

SINGAPORE: The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) chief fintech officer Sopnendu Mohanty said he does not foresee a Lehman Brothers-like financial meltdown with Bitcoin at this point of time.
In an interview with CNA Asia (to be telecast Jan 25 at 8.30pm), Mr Mohanty pointed out that regulators around the world are keeping a close watch on cryptocurrency trades, and there is “a great indication that regulators are getting serious about this whole cryptocurrency market”.
He added that as the market for digital currencies like Bitcoin continue to grow, regulators would eventually step in to apply consumer-protection regulation that will correct the hype.

In its most recent statements, the country’s Financial Services Commission (FSC) confirmed that exchanges must only permit trades from customers whose name matches their bank account. Foreign citizens, both native and non-native, will not be allowed to trade.

“Establishment of the system for ‘real name verification of deposit and withdrawal accounts’ for settlement will be completed by January 30, 2018,” the FSC documentation reads.*

Litecoin, which is an altcoin that has long been marketed as the “silver to bitcoin’s gold”, was not the most difficult thing for creator Charlie Lee to launch. He simply took the Bitcoin Core codebase, changed a few parameters (such as the block time and mining algorithm), and then posted the new creation on bitcointalk.org.

More than six years after this initial launch, this close relationship to the code found in Bitcoin Core, which is effectively the reference implementation of the Bitcoin protocol, has become one of Litecoin’s greatest strengths.

Over the past week, there’s been heightened tension around the conversation about bitcoin fees and confirmation times. Many individuals have been complaining about unconfirmed transactions and average median transaction fees, costing $31-52 USD on December 23. With bitcoin being divisible by eight decimals, many of those decimals are rendered useless as small amounts of satoshis held on wallets can never be spent unless fees subside.